Wednesday, 27 March 2013

Real Journalism on the Syrian Civil War

With those hapless mere politicians PM Cameron and William Hague playing at being global "statesmen" ,when really being little more than oily proponents of "Public Diplomacy" , they might wish to inform themselves of the real state of affairs on the ground in Syria beforeconsidering lifting the arms embargo in the EU and uncritically backing the Washington line on Syria.

Patrick Cockburn's Independent article is instructive to those for who these civil wars are messy an complex.Cockburn writes,

'It is one of the most horrifying videos of the war in Syria. It shows two men
being beheaded by Syrian rebels, one of them by a child. He hacks with a machete
at the neck of a middle-aged man who has been forced to lie in the street with
his head on a concrete block. At the end of the film, a soldier, apparently from
the Free Syrian Army, holds up the severed heads by their hair in
triumph.

The film is being widely watched on YouTube by Syrians, reinforcing their
fears that Syria is imitating Iraq's descent into murderous warfare in the years
after the US invasion in 2003. It fosters a belief among Syria's non-Sunni
Muslim minorities, and Sunnis associated with the government as soldiers or
civil servants, that there will be no safe future for them in Syria if the
rebels win. In one version of the video, several of which are circulating, the
men who are beheaded are identified as officers belonging to the 2.5 million-strong Alawite
community. This is the Shia sect to which President Bashar al-Assad and core
members of his regime belong. The beheadings, so proudly filmed by the
perpetrators, may well convince them that they have no alternative but to fight
to the end.

The video underlines a startling contradiction in the policy of the US and
its allies. In the past week, 130 countries have recognised the National
Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces as the legitimate
representatives of the Syrian people. But, at the same time, the US has
denounced the al-Nusra Front, the most effective fighting force of the rebels,
as being terrorists and an al-Qa'ida affiliate. Paradoxically, the US makes
almost exactly same allegations of terrorism against al-Nusra as does the Syrian
government. Even more bizarrely, though so many states now recognise the
National Coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people, it is
unclear if the rebels inside Syria do so. Angry crowds in rebel-held areas of
northern Syria on Friday chanted "we are all al-Nusra" as they demonstrated
against the US decision.

The Syrian uprising, which began in March 2011, was not always so
bloodthirsty or so dominated by the Sunnis who make up 70 per cent of the 23
million-strong Syrian population. At first, demonstrations were peaceful and the
central demands of the protesters were for democratic rule and human rights as
opposed to a violent, arbitrary and autocratic government. There are Syrians who
claim that the people against the regime remains to this day the central feature
of the uprising, but there is compelling evidence that the movement has slid
towards sectarian Islamic fundamentalism intent on waging holy war.

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About the Blog

This blog is mostly about the New Great Game for resources across the globe, the impact of oil and gas dependency upon both Britain and the oil rich nations, the purported interconnections between foreign policy and terrorism, the growth of Islamism and the mendacious nature of much 'Public Diplomacy'. It also seeks to anticipate the forthcoming threats to world peace by discerning the true nature of the new emerging psychopathologies that come with the struggle over diminishing natural resources, global warming, proxy conflicts and the prospect of civilisational collapse in regions such as the Middle East, Central Africa and the Maghreb.